Instagram is a photo sharing app for the iOS devices that makes it simple to share fun photos via Facebook, Twitter, or its built in social network. I started using Instagram last November and my first upload to the community was <sarcasm> nothing short of amazing. It was taken in my Jeep, on the way home from work.

Since then, I have uploaded over 130 photos, and each of them tells a different story that is imporatant to me. Quickly, you learn of my love of soda.

I shared a photo of the Rocket Launcher that I built with the Boy Scouts from the pages of Make Magazine.

Instagram features a bunch of built-in filters that allow you to change the look of the images that you take. It allows for some stunning modifications, like this photo that I took at the Tumacori National Historic Park in Arizona last year.

In the digital age that we live in, sometimes it feels better to roll back to our analog roots. You know what I mean, pick up a book instead of the iPad, shoot with the Holga instead of the iPhone, or go outside and play catch instead of bowling on the Wii. With this in mind, over the last few years I have made a few attempts to print more of my photos. On my Nikon D80, I just rolled past over 100,000 shutter clicks, but I have probably printed less then 500 of those photos. From my iPhone, over the last few years I have taken over 5000 photos, but few, if any of those have been printed.

Perhaps it is just for nostalgia’s sake, but it feels good to hold a photo in your hand. When those photos are bound together and become a book, you get a lasting analog product that you can really be proud of. For me, this is 21st century scrapbooking.

Recently Blurb announced a new tool to turn your Instgram photos into a beautiful photo book. Other tools like this are difficult to use, and take a lot of work in the creation process. Downloading your photos, uploading them to a web site, and so on. This isn’t the case with Blurb. You log in to your Instagram account, and all of your photos are pulled over. You get a nice timeline of all of your photos, which you can drop onto the pages in Blurb’s Bookify tool.

The prices are very reasonable, starting at $10.95 for a 20 page softcover book, and going to only about $30.00 for a hard bound version with a dust jacket.

The results are stunning. The photos are clear and colorful, and the binding is strong.

You ought to flip through the whole book. My mom was like, there are lot of food pictures… :)